Our eyes get drawn to a cheery smile in any portrait photo. But most of us don’t come with perfect set of dentures. A little yellow tinge on those pearly whites can be distracting enough to take something away from the look. This is where Adobe Photoshop shines.

You can use a simple three-minute technique to bring back the sparkle in the teeth.

We are going to work with this sample photo from Pixabay.com. Notice the lively smile. There’s nothing that mars the photograph, but we can retouch it to make it even better.

You can name the layer. The Properties box will be displayed next. Reduce the Vibrance to “-50” or “-60“.

Vibrance and saturation are two controls you can use to control color. While saturation enhances every color in a photo to the same degree, vibrance is subtler. It changes the intensity of the more muted colors and leaves the already well-saturated colors alone. For example, vibrance prevents skin tones from becoming over saturated.

In this case, we move the vibrance to the left and set a negative value to subtly wash out any unwanted color on the teeth and bring it close to white. But as you will see, the vibrance setting will take out the color from the entire image, so we need the help of a Mask to protect rest of the image and affect just the teeth.

Step 2. Select the Vibrance layer in the Layers panel and choose the associated Layer Mask.

Step 3. Open the Properties Panel and click the Invert button to fill the mask with black. When you invert a mask, you get the flexibility to apply an adjustment to only a specific part of an image — in this case, the teeth. Black hides the desaturation due to the vibrance layer. Painting with white will reveal it.

Zoom into the teeth at an optimum percentage (Ctrl + on Windows, Cmd + on Mac).

Step 4. Select a soft-edged brush from the tool bar. Pick a suitable size for painting over the teeth. Now paint over the teeth to whiten it.

Saikat Basu is the Deputy Editor for Internet, Windows, and Productivity. After removing the grime of an MBA and a ten year long marketing career, he is now passionate about helping others improve their storytelling skills. He looks out for the missing Oxford comma and hates bad screenshots. But Photography, Photoshop, and Productivity ideas soothe his soul.